Early-career Chinese language teachers face identity conflicts beyond the lecture hall

Early-career teachers of Chinese in university preparatory programs for international students experience professional identity conflicts that are far more complex than a simple gap between ideals and reality, according to a qualitative study published on 1 October 2026 in the Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education. The research, led by Chenxi Wu with Yuxin Hao, Zhanbo Wang and Qianyu Huo, examined how novice preparatory Chinese language teachers, or PCTs, navigate the competing demands of intensive teaching, strict student management and administrative duties within a highly institutionalized Chinese university setting. The authors argue that these conflicts unfold through a distinct psychological process and can lead to three very different career outcomes, ranging from successful adaptation to complete exit from the field.

The study responds to a gap in existing research. While considerable attention has been paid to transnational Chinese language teachers working in cross-cultural contexts abroad, comparatively little is known about teachers who work within the domestic, highly structured preparatory programs of Chinese universities. These programs are one-to-two-year transitional curricula designed to prepare international students for degree study. As China has become a popular destination for international students, demand for such preparatory education has grown substantially, yet the teachers who deliver it remain underexamined. The authors note that these teachers occupy a cross-field position: they work inside a university system oriented toward academic capital, but their labor is embedded in market-oriented, service-focused language training, and the professional capital they develop is not always fully recognized in mainstream university evaluation systems.

To investigate these tensions, the researchers combined self-discrepancy theory, which distinguishes among the actual self, the ideal self and the ought self, with an appraisal-based process model of identity conflict. The ought self encompasses attributes a person believes they are expected to possess because of obligations or responsibilities, while the ideal self reflects aspirations and the actual self reflects perceived attributes. The framework proposes that discrepancies among these selves become identity conflicts only when they are appraised as threatening to identities the individual values, and that subsequent appraisal of personal and contextual resources shapes how teachers cope. The study then traced a five-stage process: self-discrepancy, threat appraisal, resource appraisal, strategy selection and identity reconstruction.

The research took place at a preparatory education college at a public university in Southeast China that has been approved as a preparatory education base for international students receiving Chinese Government Scholarships. The college achieved a 100 percent pass rate for five consecutive years on the unified examination for undergraduate preparatory programs, currently known as the China Scholastic Competency Assessment. Through the first author’s professional network, six PCTs who had been formally employed for no more than two years were recruited. Four were female and two were male, aged between 25 and 30, all held master’s degrees and had one to three years of pre-service teaching experience. Data collection occurred in two phases: face-to-face semi-structured interviews of roughly 60 minutes per participant in September 2023, and follow-up interviews of about 30 minutes per participant via WeChat voice calls in October 2025, supplemented by informal communications. The study received research ethics approval from the authors’ university and used member checking to verify transcripts.

The findings show that the teachers’ identity conflicts arose from oppositions among three selves rather than a single ideal-versus-reality gap. Participants’ ideal selves included becoming university Chinese language teachers focused on language teaching and the dissemination of Chinese culture, with autonomy to coordinate work and personal time, and building mentor-like, equal teacher-student relationships. The institutional environment, however, shaped a sharply different ought self. The preparatory model’s requirement of integrating teaching with student management meant teachers had to act as homeroom teachers, or Banzhuren, for international students, conducting classroom management similar to that of Chinese high schools and bearing additional administrative workloads. Pressure from pass rates and variation in student academic ability further turned them, in their words, into teaching machines focused on knowledge mastery and efficiency. Crucially, the researchers found that teachers did not treat these requirements as merely external pressures; many gradually internalized them as personal ought standards, which intensified threats to their sense of professional value, competence and career sustainability.

During the primary appraisal stage, teachers evaluated whether these discrepancies threatened three dimensions of their professional identity. Value threats arose when institutionalized practices, such as uniform instruction with little room for teacher autonomy, violated their core educational beliefs. Competence threats stemmed from feeling underprepared for multiple responsibilities, including managing students from multiple national backgrounds, handling unexpected situations in student management, and having little time to pursue research development despite university expectations. Sustainability threats emerged when accumulated demands, including office hours, evening self-study supervision, regular overtime, difficulty transitioning from project-based contracts to long-term positions, insecure performance pay and low hourly wages, led teachers to question whether they could remain in the profession at all. One participant described the workload by saying she sometimes jokingly called herself a workshop worker, noting long working hours and holidays that were hard to guarantee.

After perceiving such threats, teachers entered the secondary appraisal stage, taking stock of personal resources such as motivation, confidence from pre-service experience and emotional resilience, alongside contextual factors including in-service training, collegial relationships, uneven distribution of work and insufficient institutional support. Those who judged their resources as relatively sufficient adopted threat-reduction strategies, adjusting teaching methods, building supportive relationships with colleagues of similar age and sharing workload, for example by training graduate teaching assistants. Others adopted cognitive reappraisal, reinterpreting conflict-inducing situations as opportunities for growth; one participant described challenging herself with systematic teaching from beginner to advanced levels in a short period and later completing curriculum development and compiling corresponding textbooks. A third group, perceiving insufficient support and little possibility of changing the environment in the short term, shifted toward identity protection, treating the preparatory position as transitional and preparing exit options, such as applying for doctoral programs.

Follow-up data collected approximately two years after the initial interviews showed that these coping strategies developed into three relatively stable identity trajectories. The first, integrative adaptation, was observed among teachers who used threat-reduction or cognitive reappraisal strategies; they achieved professional growth through optimizing teaching modes, developing curricula and compiling materials, and gradually reaffirmed the meaning of being a preparatory Chinese teacher within the existing institutional framework. The second, strategic temporary withdrawal, was driven by long-term enactment of identity protection; two participants eventually chose to pursue doctoral study in order to accumulate capital for future teaching-and-research positions in higher education, though they had not completely withdrawn from the field of international Chinese language education. The third, erosion-driven exit, was observed in only one participant and reflected a gradual process in which unresolved value, competence and sustainability threats, combined with prolonged pressure, repeated frustration and insufficient resources, led to exit from the field of Chinese language education.

The authors emphasize that the conflicts experienced by these teachers differ from those reported for transnational Chinese teachers, who often work at the margins of others’ institutional systems and face cross-cultural adaptation challenges, and from those of university EFL teachers, whose conflicts typically center on balancing teaching, research and administrative roles. For PCTs, the key pressures stem instead from the intensive teaching model, homeroom-teacher-like responsibilities, exam-performance pressure within the preparatory program system and the ways these demands are internalized within teachers’ self-systems. The study also highlights the critical role of the ought self: context does not merely alter work content but transforms the sources and intensity of teachers’ self-guides, thereby restructuring the nature of identity conflict itself.

The authors caution that the findings come from a small sample drawn primarily from preparatory programs at a small number of universities, with relatively concentrated regional and program types, so generalization to different contexts should be approached with caution. They also note that two rounds of interviews and informal exchanges remain insufficient to capture the nuanced changes in individual teachers’ repeated cycles of appraisal and coping. At the practical level, the study suggests that alleviating novice PCTs’ identity conflicts requires joint efforts from individuals and organizations: teacher education and induction training should help novice teachers recognize discrepancies among their actual, ideal and ought selves and expand their support networks, while administrators should delineate boundaries in integrated teaching-management arrangements and preserve room for autonomy and advancement pathways. As the China Scholastic Competency Assessment expands and preparatory education becomes normalized in Chinese universities, the authors argue, understanding how these teachers construct their professional identities will become increasingly significant.

Subject of Research: Identity conflicts and career trajectories of early-career Chinese preparatory language teachers in Chinese universities

Article Title: Acting beyond the language lecturer: multifaceted identity conflicts of early-career Chinese language teachers in university preparatory programs in China

Article References: Wu, C., Hao, Y., Wang, Z., & Huo, Q. (2026). Acting beyond the language lecturer: multifaceted identity conflicts of early-career Chinese language teachers in university preparatory programs in China. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 11(1), Article 86. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-026-00463-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40862-026-00463-z

Keywords: teacher identity, preparatory Chinese language education, self-discrepancy theory, identity conflict, early-career teachers, qualitative interviews, thematic analysis, career sustainability, Chinese universities, international students, appraisal process, teacher attrition